Merchant Center & Feed Rebuild
Disapprovals cleared at source, GTIN, MPN and attribute gaps closed, and titles rewritten to lead with searched terms. Custom labels for margin, stock cover and seasonality.
Baltimore, MD
Google Ads Management in Baltimore, MD
Capturing the demand that already exists — for Baltimore catalogues where availability, season and part numbers change what should even be serving.
Delivered remotely for brands across Baltimore and Maryland.
Grow · Baltimore
Why Baltimore brands come to us for this
- Merchant Center titles rebuilt around grade, pack count and 'overnight shipped' — the language perishable buyers actually type
- Campaign state tied to your ship-day and blackout calendar, so heat embargoes and storms pause product groups, not revenue
- GTIN and MPN gaps closed across lab, diagnostic and industrial lines where identifiers decide serving eligibility
- Branded search isolated into its own campaign, because a forty-year-old Baltimore name flatters a blended ROAS badly
- The DC corridor split out as its own geo target with its own bids, delivery messaging and price framing
Google is demand capture. Somebody has already decided they want overnight crab for their father's birthday, or a replacement seal for a specific machine, and the only open question is who supplies it. On Shopify that contest is decided in Merchant Center long before it is decided in the campaign builder, and in Baltimore's categories the feed is unusually volatile — availability moves with the catch, seasons open and close, and a disapproved product is invisible on exactly the query you most wanted.
So the work starts in the feed and stays there longer than most accounts expect. Titles rewritten to lead with what buyers type, which for a perishable means the size grade, the pack count and the words 'overnight' or 'shipped' rather than an internal SKU description. GTIN and MPN gaps closed on lab and industrial lines where identifiers are the difference between eligibility and silence. Custom labels built around margin, season state and stock cover, so a product with three days of inventory left is not being pushed by an automated campaign that does not know it.
Structure comes second. Brand separated from non-brand, because in this region branded search inflates ROAS badly — a shipper that has been in a family for forty years gets a lot of people typing its name in December, and blending that into non-brand hides whether the acquisition side works at all. Shopping and Performance Max carry the catalogue with asset groups split by margin band and season rather than one catch-all. Search runs alongside it for everything the feed structurally cannot express. Bids move only at the end, set from contribution margin per product group, and moved in increments with a written reason attached.
Local context
The feed has to know about the season, the weather and the freight
A Baltimore account has failure modes that a normal apparel account does not. Advertising overnight perishables into a heat embargo or a nor'easter burns budget on orders you will have to refund, so we tie campaign state to your ship-day and blackout calendar and pause the affected product groups rather than the whole account. Season transitions get the same treatment: crab lines wind down as oyster lines come up, and both need feed and budget shape changed on a schedule rather than in a panic. Gifting demand concentrates hard into December for the food brands and needs its own campaign and its own creative annotations, while the industrial and lab side stays flat all year and is judged on query quality rather than volume. We also geo-split the Washington corridor deliberately: forty miles south the buyer has a different price tolerance and a real local-delivery option, and merging it into one Mid-Atlantic target quietly overpays in one market and underbids in the other.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Baltimore brand’s realities.
Full service detailBrand, Non-Brand & Conquesting
Branded demand isolated into its own campaign, budget and target so non-brand performance becomes visible. Competitor conquesting runs as a separate line, judged separately.
Shopping & Performance Max Structure
Asset groups split by margin band and product type instead of one catch-all, with listing-group bids, product exclusions and brand-term controls applied wherever PMax still allows them.
Query Mining & Negative Hygiene
A weekly pass over search terms and PMax category reports, with a maintained shared negative library so budget stops leaking into research, DIY and job-seeker queries.
Promotions & Merchant Programs
Merchant promotions, sale price annotations, shipping and returns policy setup, product ratings, and local inventory ads where you have stores worth feeding.
tROAS Bidding to Contribution Margin
Targets set from margin per product group rather than a platform default, moved in controlled increments, with a written reason attached to every bid and budget change.
Scoped and quoted for your Baltimore store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Baltimore engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Feed & Account Audit
Merchant Center diagnostics, attribute coverage, campaign overlap and wasted spend scored against ninety days of search terms. You get the findings whether you hire us or not.
Fix the Feed
Titles, attributes, product types and custom labels rebuilt before any campaign work. A perfectly structured account on a bad feed still shows the wrong products to the wrong queries.
Restructure
Brand, non-brand, Shopping, PMax and Search rebuilt with hard budget boundaries and a shared negative library, so each line answers a different commercial question.
Bid to Margin
tROAS targets derived from contribution margin by product group and applied gradually, so the account keeps its learning instead of resetting it every Monday.
Mine & Expand
Weekly query mining, monthly feed reviews, then expansion into the categories the search data says you can profitably win. Nothing scales before the query set is clean.
Proof
Google Ads results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Performance Apparel (DTC)
~$6M/yr DTC, 900+ SKUs across size and colour variants, US · Shopify Plus
Returns ran at 31% and refund cost consumed the entire paid media margin. One size chart image served 40 different fits, and 62% of add-to-carts started on a collection page that never showed variant availability. The named constraint: no new product photography budget, so every fix had to come out of the existing asset library and the review corpus.
+29%sitewide conversion rate1.71% to 2.21%, five-month average
+14%average order value$84 to $96 once the threshold bar and cross-sell shipped
31% → 22%return ratenine-point drop, roughly $310k/yr in recovered margin
1.9x → 2.4xblended MERwith paid spend held flat throughout
Consumer Electronics & Accessories
~$9M/yr, 210 SKUs, US + AU · Shopify Plus (migrated from BigCommerce)
Meta ROAS had slid from 3.6x to 1.9x in a year and the team had spent twelve months buying new creative to fix it. The real cause was measurement: the BigCommerce checkout dropped 22% of purchase events and the Conversions API had never been installed, so both ad platforms were optimising on incomplete data. The named constraint: peak season was 14 weeks out, and the replatform had to be live and stable well before Black Friday traffic arrived.
1.9x → 3.4xMeta ROAS, once the 22% event gap closed60 days after server-side tracking went live, spend up 18%. Most of that is signal we recovered, not performance we invented — the honest number is the blended CAC below, which is measured against Shopify orders
-32%customer acquisition cost$44 to $30 blended across Meta and Google
4.1s → 1.7smobile LCPdesktop went 2.9s to 1.2s over the same window
+47%peak-season revenueBlack Friday through Cyber Monday, year over year
In their words
Clients on this work
Non-brand search revenue ~2x at flat spend
“Six thousand products and a Shopping feed nobody had touched since it was first generated — a third of it was disapproved and we had no idea. They rebuilt the feed off our real product data, fixed the GTIN and size attributes, and split brand off from non-brand so I could finally see what we were actually paying to acquire. They also cut the broad 'baby clothes' terms that were eating a quarter of the budget on people who were nowhere near buying. Spend is roughly flat and non-brand search revenue has close to doubled.”
Director of OperationsKids & baby brand, ~$5M/yr · Atlanta, GA
Verified via Shopify Partner referralFAQ
Google Ads in Baltimore — your questions
Not on the affected lines. We build the pause into the operating calendar so the perishable product groups come out of Shopping and PMax while the embargo holds, and non-perishable, gifting and gift-card lines keep running. Spending into a window where every order becomes a refund is worse than spending nothing, and it damages the account's conversion data on top of the direct cost.
It copes if the feed updates on the same cadence your inventory does. Price and availability mismatches are the most common cause of disapprovals we find in this category, and they usually trace to a feed refreshing more slowly than the store. We tighten the sync, add availability-based custom labels so low-cover items are throttled rather than pushed, and review diagnostics weekly instead of when revenue drops.
With a negative library built for this specific ambiguity. A lot of regional food searches carry local dine-in and market intent that will never convert on a national shipping store, and left unattended they absorb a real share of budget. We mine those weekly, exclude them, and separately assess whether a genuine pickup or will-call offer is worth its own campaign rather than pollution in the main one.
Both, differently. Shopping serves them when the identifier is in the title and the GTIN or MPN is populated, which is where most industrial feeds fall down. Search catches the long tail of superseded numbers, misspellings and cross-reference codes a feed cannot anticipate, so we mine those from the query report and build them out as an explicit campaign rather than hoping PMax finds them.
Yes, once the feed and the exclusions are right. PMax on a clean feed with margin-segmented asset groups and brand controls is the strongest Shopping vehicle Google has shipped. PMax on a neglected feed is an expensive way to sell bestsellers to people who were buying anyway.
Because Shopping never sees your keywords, only your feed. Title, product type, GTIN and attributes decide which queries you are even eligible for. We routinely find a quarter of a catalogue disapproved or serving on the wrong terms, and fixing that moves revenue before a single bid changes.
Usually yes, but as a separate campaign with its own target and its own conversation. Branded clicks are cheap and convert well, which is exactly why blending them into non-brand hides whether the rest of the account works. Where the spend is material we run a holdout to see what is genuinely incremental.
Next step
Google Ads for your Baltimore brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.